April 18, 2024
If you haven't seen it yet, take a swing around the new feature at Open Secrets - the net worth report filings for members of Congress and a some candidates.
The site ranks the wealthiest filers as well, and one northwesterner made the list of top 25: Oregon Senator Gordon Smith at 24 (and 10th among the 100 U.S. senators), with an estimated worth between $13 million and $62.3 million. No one else in the region's congressional delegation came close.
If you've been around downtown Portland the last couple of weeks, you've seen something unusual - visual evidence of a labor strike (other than by teachers, which isn't so rare). In this case, the strikers are members of the carpenters union (in western Oregon and southwestern Washington), primarily dry wallers, and they're striking principally in seeking a pay raise.
They produced a video showing - for those who haven't seen - what some of the activity looks like.
We asked Zack Knowling, the consultant who sent along the link to the video, about the status of the strike, and his reply this afternoon suggests it might not be over soon:
"As far as I know, there have been no formal negotiations, nor have none been scheduled, between the carpenters and the contractors. However, if you check out www.nwcarpenters.org, you will see strike updates that show some contractors peeling off from their parent organization to sign interim agreements with the union. So headway is being made, but the carpenters are still waiting on the official word from the contractors association that they are ready to negotiate a fair contract."
Strikes are more or less the ultimate weapons labor has, and they have been but barely used in most industries in recent decades - a measure, in considerable part, of the decline in clout of organized labor. (Those who remember back to the middle part of the last century recall a time when strikes weren't rare at all.)
So we'll keep watch to see how this one goes. No doubt, plenty of other people will as well.
The original article in the Seattle Times didn't link this to the driving-while-cell-talking debate, but we will . . .
On Friday a Washington state trooper on Interstate 90 near Bellevue saw an SUV weaving and meandering around the lanes - a clear hazard. He pulled the vehicle over, and as he looked inside, several issues quickly became apparent. For one thing, the driver and passenger appeared to have been drinking (confirmed by a blood alcohol test); they were also underage (for drinking at all). Besides that, the male driver and female passenger were wearing no clothes, and evidently had been involved in an undefined but easily imagined "physical act" while swerving around the interstate.
The trooper's quote nailed it: "We harp on the fact that being impaired is so dangerous, but being distracted is equally as dangerous. I can't think of anything more distracting than this."
And not a cell phone in sight . . .